


Suicide note of Sherlock William Holmes

by AuroraDefae



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Gen, Sherlock's suicide?, john's suicide?, suicide note
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-04-21
Updated: 2013-06-11
Packaged: 2017-12-09 02:55:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 2,287
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/769142
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AuroraDefae/pseuds/AuroraDefae
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sorry for any mistakes caused by the fact I typed this at twelve at night.<br/>Might make this a series, don't know.<br/>-======-<br/>But anyways, Sherlock returns to the flat to find John's note...suicidal (text from my "The Suicide Note of Doctor John Hamish Watson") In rashness, Sherlock mixes his own poison. </p><p>But the question is, is John out there still?<br/>Will they be okay with both's near deaths hanging over them?</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

_"....They take you to a special room and burn you."_  
  
 _"I will burn you.. I will burn the heart out of you."_  
  
To his calculated mind, that was often going off the track, he felt it specifically one course as he held the slightly wrinkled paper in his hands.   
  
 _"Dear Sherlock, I have waited three years. Three bloody long years. At first, I thought you would come back, but the years wore on and..and..I began to doubt my eyes, and what I saw, and just..I lost that glimmering hope. Others have tried to help me, but I shout or threaten at them, and they gave up pretty fast. It's just..life. It's nothing anymore. I..can't do this anymo-"  
_  
He knew it was his fault. He knew he had pushed John to the point of hopelessness. He knew that John's hope and belief in him were not that strong. The flat was silent, suffocating. Dusty. Empty. Whispering secrets that Sherlock wanted to ignore. He pressed his forehead to his hands, covering his eyes, trying to block out the stories of the life of John that spoke all around him. the places where he had hidden cigarettes. The places where he had spilled tea on the rug. Where said mug had shattered, and all the pieces still lying previously unfound.  
  
Sherlock leaned over and started to pick them up, one by one. They felt sharp, but the pain distracted him from the stories.   
  
The floor's squeak was too loud as he walked to the kitchen to dump the shards in the bin. He swallowed hastily as he saw the kitchen was hardly lived in. There was more dust in here; John must have forgotten to eat frequently during the three years.   
  
His microscope was dusty, and he blew it off before continuing around and checking his chemicals. None seemed to be missing.... a few were broken, the dried crust lying around it. Some of his equipment showed sign of breaking, and he even noticed drops of brownish-red.   
  
John's blood.  
  
Not knowing what caused him to do it, Sherlock noticed he was hugging himself and shivering slightly, despite his coat.   
  
 _This silence is agonizing._  
  
He walked over to a lamp, turning it on only to turn it off again, the stories screaming out at him.  
  
 _You shot the wall?_  
 _The piece of paper from that photo web is still stuck on that nail._  
 _Cigarette ashes.  
  
_ And even worse, the ones he hadn't been there for. John's life as he lived alone.  
 _  
_ _More pronounced bullet holes that he must have shot, the bullet holes forming a frown on the smiley face.  
_ _  
_His heart contracting with pain, Sherlock walked fearfully to the drawer. He took a deep breath and opened it.  
 _  
The gun is still here. Fully loaded, not a bullet missing. Shows signs of use, very shiny.  
  
_ Sherlock picked it up, weighing it in his hands. He quickly put it down and shoved the drawer closed as he realized the thought he had thought when he had reached down to take it.   
 _  
_ _I can't believe this.  
_ _  
_He stalked back to his lab, grabbing the chemicals he knew were lethal. He clumsily mixed them together, cursing when he spilled.  
 __  
Eventually, he stood staring at the beaker, a deep, poisonous green. With shaking hands he lifted it, and was about to tip it back when footsteps sounded. He froze. And listened.  
  
He was about to tip it back again when the door banged open and Lestrade stormed in.   
  
"Bloody Hell, Sherlock. Don't drink that. Don't you dare drink that."  
  
"I'm sorry Lestrade," he said as he tipped the glass back.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry it's so short. Still don't know quite where I'm going with this..

_What was that bloody beeping noise?_

_**** _

_Wasn’t death just....it? Silence, darkness, nothing?_

_**** _

_And aren’t you supposed to not feel anything?_

_**** _

He could feel sheets crinkling around him, his mind foggy and stuffed with wet cotton, so weighed down it was barely moving.

****

_Was he dying still? The arsenic he had mixed should have started to work immediately after consumption. He didn’t feel convulsion, vomiting, or any of the symptoms._

****

He groaned painstakingly, his throat dry, and froze as he realized he could still make noise. That he could breathe. That he was alive.

****

He tried to lift his arm to cover his face, but couldn’t. He focused his attention on it, realizing it was buried under wires and tubes. The beeps speed up. His heart was progressing at a semi-healthy rate. Not only was he alive, he wasn’t dying.

****

He sighed, trying to move into a more comfortable position. The overhead lights at the hospital, he had to be at one if all this equipment was here, blared behind his closed eyes, a very vivid red.

****

He dropped into sleep just as the other person in the room, who could clearly see him, sighed too.

**  
** _Sherlock, I’m sorry._


	3. Chapter 3

 

He awoke who knows how much later, his brain still foggy. For some reason, he still couldn’t open his eyes. He heard the beep-beep-beep speed up as he strained to open them. He grumbled in resignment, focusing instead on the voices, the idle chatter of bored nurses. He doesn't focus on the words, just lets the jumbled conversation wash over him. The wires poked into him as he tried to resettle, and he felt a nurse come over and move them. She jumped slightly when he tried to open his eyes again, and he could hear her intake of breath and her quick footsteps away from him.

****

As he sat there, straining to hear a hint of anything, the day, his condition, he heard a man nearby grumble before he was hushed. Semi-squeaky wheel passed his bed, and he could feel the tension in the air. He wondered who could have been in the room with him, who the nurses would condemn to be with a man recovering from arsenic poisoning. God, they were insane.

****

He vaguely wished again for the adrenaline rush of falling, the feeling of weightlessness. If only he could fall for eons, never reaching the destination.  Just the air and the adrenaline, the chaotic joy.

****

One of the reasons he didn't like to close his eyes and sleep was the fact his mind wasn't controlled when the world was not distracting him. He needed stimulus from his surroundings to maintain a healthy frame of mind. But now, when he couldn't open his eyes, he felt the Jekyll in him. The one with the fickle emotions. The one who acted without thinking. The one who remembered instead of figuring.

****

He heard footsteps again, the squeaking of an old, worn sneaker. He tried to form his mouth to speak, but found it nearly impossible to rise past the fog in his brain.

****

So he shut off the part of him trying to speak, falling again into his silence and memories, wishing for an end to this monotony. He vaguely recognized that the nurse was trying to tell him something, but he couldn't discern it.

****

She prodded him for a bit, opening his eyes and taking his pulse. He just lay there, feeling dead. For some reason, none of his limbs would move. They were numb. Except for the fact he could feel a cold, thick substance entering his right arm, and he focused on it until he was unconscious.

****

The nurse sighed, flipping a few switches before walking the yard to the other side of the room, pulling back a curtain before walking out.

 


	4. Personal ghost

As soon as he realized he was awake, he cursed whatever had woken him up. He had been dreaming of how things could have been different. How he should have seen that fateful day’s events and how he could have avoided the fall. The light was bright, brighter than bright, when he had jumped.....

 

He realized he could open his eyes, and he squinted as the bright lights overhead blinded him. He couldn't move his head easily, but he was able to slowly turn it to his right to see nothing but a fluttering curtain, a sickly white color hanging from the ceiling to within three centimeters from the floor. The walls, ceiling and floors were all  a gleaming white that hurt to look at when the sunlight reflected off. He felt a bit dazed as the heart monitor beeped steadily beside him, and he blinked a bit, looking down at himself.

 

He was in a hospital gown with a thin blanket pulled over him. One of Mrs. Hudson's quilts was draped over him, the warmth and comfort contrasting with the thin, inhuman tubes and wires poking into his arm. He noticed with detachment that his arms were twitching slightly, the veins standing out bright and blue. His breath was shaky as he took in his state. He was alive.

  


He wasn't hungry, or thirsty. He just felt....there. Not angry or sad. With a bit of surprise, he realized he wasn't bored. Maybe it was the pain coursing through his body, but he was patient. Waiting to continue his life on this accursed planet alone.

 

_Alone....._

 

_John._

  


He bit his lip. Their friendship gone. The one with the psychosomatic limp, gone. The one who said "brilliant," gone. The one who put up with him, gone. Their would be no more conversations, no more deductions, no more cases with him.

 

He tried to stare into the bright light to stop the tears in his eyes from spilling. And then through the pain and the beeping and his uncontrollable emotions, he heard someone's voice. Deep, scratchy, familiar but distant memory. A doc..doctor to ask him we he had tried to kill himself. He ignored the person cutting through his silence, continuing to stare out the window.

 

"Sherlock."

 

“....Sherlock." The voice wheezed, but Sherlock didn't show that he had heard. Maybe they would leave him alone if he could outlast him with his silence.

 

They stopped and he inwardly rejoiced in the quiet only punctuated by the steady beeping indicating his heartbeat. He waited with this newfound patience, waiting for footsteps, waiting for something to happen besides the beeping and the quiet sunlight. He closed his eyes to the harmony this scene was lulling him into. Five (was it five?) days ago, he had found out his best friend was suicidal. Five days ago, he had poisoned himself. To get the death he had always wanted but was too scared to pursue. And now here he was, unmistakably alive. Sunlight streaming through a window. A stranger who wanted to talk to him.

 

And a piece of himself that he wanted to destroy. That voice was impossibly familiar. Changed. Hoarser, as if it had spent forever crying. It was a shard of glass in his heart, broken and stabbed in when everything shattered. His life would shatter again if he turned to look. To ghost or flesh, he couldn’t let his life shatter now. He would have to live. Beat by beat, breath by breath.

 

Even if it meant a ghost, hovering, waiting.

 

John.

  
_His personal ghost._


	5. Chapter 5

Instead of the window, he chose to try to stare at the ceiling today to avoid the people who came in. He had completely pretended to be asleep when Mrs. Hudson had come by to put a new quilt over him. He could picture her sympathetic look as she stared at his gaunt frame, even gaunter in his absence. She had said something indiscernible to his ghost, who had muttered back.

 

He was drifting back to sleep when he heard squeaky sneakers walking his way. A nurse's colorful shrubs came into focus as he squinted with his eyes half-closed. He groaned and tried to bury himself further into his pillow, wanting to be left alone to wither.

 

He ignored her adle reprimanding, letting her prod and poke him with needles.

 

"..And, and how- how is he?"

 

There was the ghost again. The voice anxious, tense. Sherlock could picture the ghost  leaning forward slightly with his face drawn, wrinkles scrunching between his eyes.

 

The nurse sighed,  stepping back from him.

 

"Better. He still has a lot of recovering to do. Arsenic, what was he thinking?" She pondered aloud, her voice trailing off.

 

Sherlock felt like roaring, "Because my life had shattered. Because my life was gone!" but he stayed silent. He didn't want to face nurses or Doctors, especially ghosts.

 

"O..okay."

 

"When do you think....?"

 

Sherlock strained his ears as they whispered.

 

"I don't know. I.. this is all my fault."

 

The ghost's voice broke, and he could hear the nurse trying to calm him down as he started crying.

 

"Shhhh.... don't hurt your wound......it'll be okay..."

 

Wound?

 

Sherlock's right eye (his other was adequately buried in the pillow) flew open to the two figures turned away from him.

 

_John, oh John._

 

This man, the ghost, was thin, gaunt, shadowed. Underneath a loose shirt, Sherlock saw heavy bandaging around his heart.

 

_I will burn the heart out of you._

 

Sherlock clenched his fists, trying desperately to not cuss and rant for what Moriarty had done to them. He had accomplished what he had wanted to, even if he had died in the process.

 

He must have made some kind of noise, because the room fell silent.

 

John made a choking noise, and Sherlock heard the nurse rapidly walking away.

 

"Sherlock-" John ventured.

 

He just shook his head as visibly as he could.

 

_I can't right now._

 

They sat in silence, not meeting each other's eyes as the minutes ticked by on the clock. After what seemed like hours, John's bed squeaked, and Sherlock eventually heard steady breathing.

 

Propping himself onto one arm, Sherlock looked at his friend, and nearly threw something across the room.

  
_I'm so sorry John._


End file.
